What Is to Be Done?

As a political philosophy, Bolshevism combined two quite distinct theories. Best known was the Jacobin theory of organization by dictatorship, a theory that descended to Lenin through Marx and the Russian Populists. Less obvious was the collectivist theory of organization through a community of believers in myth, a tradition embracing both Russian religious orthodoxy and European syndicalism. The polarity of Bolshevism resembled that of Russian society itself, in tension between the autocratic tradition of rule by a single individual, the tsar, and the self-sacrifice and martyrdom embedded in Russian Christianity and subsequent revolutionary and rebel movements. For Lenin the dichotomy was between consciousness and spontaneity, the revolutionary party and the proletariat; for Bogdanov it was between authoritarianism and collectivism. Whatever the distinction, it would appear that Bolshevism contained two political theories and not one.

For Lenin organization meant an elite party of professional revolutionaries, the vanguard of the proletariat, whose decisions took precedence over the desires of its individual members. The individual party member was expected to sacrifice for the good of the cause, and to sublimate or repress personal desires for collective purposes. As critics pointed out as early as 1904, organization soon came to mean obedience to Lenin’s authority. In this sense, few Bolsheviks were properly organized. For Bolshevism from the start was a collection of personalities, in exile and in Russia, whose views were often in conflict with Lenin’s and the Marxist orthodoxy he claimed to defend.

Lenin also inhabited a Manichean universe of light and darkness in which those who know, the illuminated, must constantly struggle with the blind. Lenin rarely doubted that he possessed the truth, even when outnumbered by his opponents. Leninist consciousness through the party would overcome mass spontaneity that contained the seeds of error, deviation, and heresy.

Lenin defined organization in his book One Step Forward, Two Steps Back (1904) in a comment on paragraph one of the RSDRP rules adopted by the London party congress in 1903: “The word organization is usually employed in two senses, a broad and a narrow one. In the narrow sense it signifies an individual nucleus of a collective of people with at least a minimum degree of form. In the broad sense it signifies the sum of such nuclei welded into a single whole . . . the party.”² Lenin favored a small organization in which the party member was fully committed, rather than a large organization which allowed for more members with looser affiliation. The second view was common enough among the Mensheviks, but the Bolsheviks themselves were divided between Leninists who accepted party authority and other Bolsheviks who sought to organize proletarian myth.

When Lenin arrived in Switzerland in 1900, the RSDRP was barely two years old and without serious organization. Paul Axelrod in Zurich and George Plekhanov in Geneva had lived in Swiss exile for some twenty years, and were involved in establishing a party newspaper, Iskra, and a journal, Zaria. After several weeks of intense discussion, Lenin set off in late August for Munich, where he established contact with a German socialist of Russian background, Alexander Helphand, known as Parvus. Through Parvus, Lenin soon met the German socialist publisher Adolf Braun, who gave him technical advice on starting a newspaper in Germany. Using the house of Parvus’s wealthy friend Dr. Lehmann as a conspiratorial center, Lenin was able to set up the first printing press for Iskra—not in Geneva, as Plekhanov had hoped, but in Parvus’s Schwabing apartment. Thus, although the editorial board— Plekhanov, Axelrod, Vera Zasulich, and A. N. Potresov—remained in Geneva, Lenin and Krupskaya established de facto control over Russia’s first social democratic newspaper in Germany. And in January 1901 Vladimir Ulianov adopted a new pseudonym to confuse the Russian and German police: Lenin.³

In the spring of 1901 Lenin began to work out the theory of political organization that would make him famous. In a series of preliminary articles in Iskra, Lenin sketched out his vision of the revolutionary party: a kind of “military activity” in which the newspaper would serve as a “collective agitator” and “collective organizer” through a “net of agents” inside Russia.⁴ Throughout the articles ran a central theme that originated not with Lenin, but with the German Marxist theoretician Karl Kautsky in 1901 in the pages of Neue Zeit: “Socialist consciousness is therefore an element imported into the class struggle of the proletariat from outside and is not something that takes shape spontaneously.”⁵ To transform the working class into a revolutionary force would take organization from outside, lest it fall into the morass of trade unionism known in Russian circles of the day as “Economism.” In March 1902 Iskra announced the appearance of these ideas in book form in Lenin’s pamphlet What Is to Be Done? (Chto delat?).

In his famous book Lenin stressed the need for a revolutionary party based on both theory and practice, fusing the “organizational skill” of professional revolutionaries with the “revolutionary experience” of the masses, peasant and proletarian. He rejected both the trade unionism of the Russian “Economists” and Bernstein and the terrorism of Russian Populism for their “subservience to spontaneity.” In his “declaration of war” on the autocracy of Nicholas II, Lenin called for “an organization of revolutionaries capable of lending energy, stability and continuity to the political struggle.” This organization would counter the surveillance and censorship of the Okhrana, the Russian political police, by the “centralization of the most secret functions” of the party. Party consciousness would channel worker spontaneity into revolutionary energy, and avoid the dissipation of that energy into childish and fruitless efforts at terror, on the one hand, or modest improvements in workers’ conditions, on the other.⁶

What is most striking in Lenin’s clarion call for a revolutionary organization is its contrast with the reality of social democratic behavior. In theory Lenin described the vanguard party of well-organized intellectuals that would bring conscious revolutionary goals to the inchoate labor movement from the outside. In practice there was no organized party, only a loose coalition of socialist and Marxist exiles and intellectuals, many of whom were in Russia. It is to the world of these Russian praktiki, not the world of émigré theories, that we must now turn.

Moscow and Vologda

Other Bolsheviks organized in Moscow and Vologda province after 1900. Already in the late 1890s Lenin’s sister Anna Elizarova and her husband, Mark, together with Lenin’s brother Dmitry, had established a Moscow Workers’ Union which retained connections through Lenin with the better-known St. Petersburg Union of Struggle. By 1896 the Moscow group boasted some fifty members, including V. V. Vorovsky and M. N. Liadov, who later became Bolsheviks; in 1898 the group promptly declared itself a committee of the newly formed RSDRP. Another central figure in Moscow was N.E. Bauman, an Iskra agent who operated under the code name “Mach”. In March 1901, however, the Moscow committee was decimated by police arrests, and among the victims were Lenin’s sister and brother-in-law, his other sister, Maria, and two brothers of A. V. Lunacharsky.⁷

In 1902 the Moscow committee was reestablished but with a number of important new members. Among them were I. I. Skvortsov (Stepanov), an economist; V. L. Shantser (Marat); two historians, N. A. Rozhkov and M. N. Pokrovsky; a dentist, P. G. Dauge; a young lawyer and syndicalist, Stanislav Volsky; and a number of other intellectuals and professional people—doctors, lawyers, teachers, writers, and professors. By the autumn of 1902 the committee had found a valuable source of patronage, the writer Maxim Gorky and his mistress, the actress Maria Andreeva.

In contrast to Lenin’s theory, the Moscow committee of the RSDRP and its Iskra agents were neither professional revolutionaries nor devout Leninists. Most were full-time professionals sympathetic to the revolutionary cause, and readers of socialist and Marxist literature. Consequently, as one of them, G. A. Alexinsky, noted, “for the Moscow Bolsheviks Lenin was one of the leaders, but they reserved complete intellectual independence from him and found any kind of blind subordination quite foreign.”⁸ In Moscow the terms “Bolshevik” and “Menshevik” carried little meaning until after the 1905 Revolution.

In exile Lenin had little real contact with events inside Russia and held a confusing picture of personalities and organizations. Lenin first encountered the writings of the future Bolshevik leader Alexander Bogdanov in the late 1890s, when he reviewed them favorably, thinking that Bogdanov was a pseudonym for Plekhanov.⁹ What Lenin read of Bogdanov he admired; he saw in Bogdanov a staunch critic of Kantian idealism and a good Marxist. In October 1901, Lenin and Krupskaya began to correspond with Bogdanov for Iskra and found him to be incautious in his communications and independent in his ideas. “We read your letter without knowing the code,” Krupskaya admonished Bogdanov from Geneva; “Don’t use the same signs for one letter.” She added that, while Iskra badly needed money, party workers, correspondence, and literature, Bogdanov should elaborate on his “differences with Iskra,”¹⁰

Lenin soon learned that Bogdanov was an influential Marxist exile in Vologda province, where he was defending Marxist philosophy against the Kievan exile, Nikolai Berdyaev; that Bogdanov was not very adept at conspiratorial correspondence; and that Bogdanov wished to reprint some Iskra pamphlets with his own editorial revisions. “We are very pleased at your proposal to publish brochures,” Lenin wrote Bogdanov in April 1902, “but we ask you not to place conditions on accepting or rejecting such brochures en bloc without any partial changes.” Lenin found Bogdanov’s article on party organization unacceptable for publication in Iskra because Bogdanov criticized the dominance of a “single individual” and the “dictatorship of one member of the committee.” Nonetheless, Lenin, in need of Russian contributors, agreed to publish whatever Bogdanov submitted “in general.”¹¹

Bogdanov was thus well known to Lenin as an influential Marxist exile in Russia and an independent thinker. Trotsky, who arrived on Lenin’s doorstep in London in October 1902, later recalled that “in philosophy we had been much impressed by Bogdanov’s book, which combined Marxism with theory of knowledge put forward by Mach and Avenarius. Lenin also thought at the time that Bogdanov’s theories were right.”¹² In addition, by November 1903 Lenin had been ousted from his editorial post with Iskra by the Mensheviks and was badly in need of supporters.

Lenin became more aware of Bogdanov’s views after the arrival in Geneva of N. V. Volsky (Valentinov), a Kievan Marxist very enthusiastic about Lenin’s plans for a revolutionary party as laid down in What Is to Be Done?¹³ Like many young people of his generation, Volsky was drawn to Marxism because it was scientific, optimistic, voluntaristic, and European. In Kiev he had also been involved in workers circles with a strong religious bent, where Christ-like carpenters led Bible discussions and espoused the labor theory of value. In the spring of 1904, Volsky introduced Lenin to the philosophy of Ernst Mach. As a self-styled starik, or elder, accustomed to the adulation of younger followers, Lenin was not pleased with the independence of thought exhibited by Volsky and Bogdanov. Exhausted and depressed from his struggle with the Mensheviks after the second RSDRP congress, Lenin now perused the writings of Ernst Mach. In so doing he discovered an entire world view that threatened his own Marxist orthodoxy, but would become an essential ingredient of Bolshevism. Lenin’s Jacobinism confronted Bogdanov’s collectivism.

The Collectivism of Alexander Bogdanov

Lenin’s major rival within the Bolshevik fraction was Alexander Aleksandrovich Malinovsky, who generally wrote under the pseudonym Bogdanov. Together with the engineer Leonid Krasin and Lenin, Bogdanov headed the Bureau of Committees of the Majority in 1905 and was in essence the leader of Bolshevism inside Russia. As the bank robber, bandit, and Bolshevik coconspirator Kamo wrote in 1905, “Leonid Borisovich Krasin introduced me to a great man. Together they run the military-technical center of the Bolsheviks. You must understand that this man knows everything. He writes scholarly books, he makes bombs and dynamite. He also treats patients, you know, as a doctor.”¹⁴

In Leninist hagiography and historiography Bogdanov has come down to us as a left-wing renegade who played dissident to Lenin’s correct and orthodox leadership. In the West he has been rediscovered as a kind of father of systems science, precursor of Norbert Wiener and cybernetics, author of endless tomes on empiriomonism, tectology, and other scientistic systems he devised or renamed. He has even been cited as an intellectual relative of the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci. In fact, Bogdanov was the major leader of Bolshevism inside Russia in the period 1905 to 1907 and a significant rival of Lenin in the European emigration afterwards. Bogdanov’s thought represented a second strand of Bolshevism, i.e., collectivism, that was as significant in shaping the ethos of Bolshevism as was Lenin’s Jacobinism.¹⁵

Bogdanov was born in 1873 in Tula, the grimy industrial town to the south of Moscow that had been an armaments center since the seventeenth century. He was the second oldest of six children born to a schoolteacher. After graduating from Tula gymnasium, Bogdanov attended Moscow University from 1891 to 1894, where he studied natural sciences and medicine. Because of his involvement with radical student organizations, Bogdanov was expelled from the university in December 1894 and exiled to his hometown of Tula. Here he underwent the shift from Populism to Marxism common among his generation in the 1890s, disseminated socialist literature among workers, and encountered a group of like-minded young radicals with whom he would ultimately enter the ranks of Bolshevism.¹⁶

Between 1894 and 1896 Bogdanov pursued the study of medicine at Kharkov University while living in Tula and participating in a Marxist discussion group. A central figure in the group was Ivan Ivanovich Savelev, a worker in one of Tula’s armament factories. Another wasV. A. Rudnev (Bazarov) (1874—1939), a Tula native also exiled from Moscow University to his home province. The circle also included Ivan Ivanovich Skvortsov (Stepanov) (1870–1928). The central idea of the group was that the labor movement should be led by workers, assisted by intellectuals—the same notion introduced, to Lenin’s dismay, into St. Petersburg in the mid-1890s by Polish Marxists.

Skvortsov had been trained as an economist, and the Tula group was intrigued by the possibility of developing Marxism in accordance with new economic theories and changing realities. In 1897 Bogdanov published A Short Course in Economic Science, a Marxist economic tract favorably reviewed by Lenin. In 1898 he probed more fundamental questions in his Basic Elements in the Historical View of Nature. Skvortsov and Bazarov combined to produce their work Social Movements of the Middle Ages and the Reformation, following Karl Kautsky in associating economic class struggle with religious millenarian movements. In addition, in 1899 Bogdanov graduated in medicine from Kharkov University, spent the next winter in jail in Tula, and in May 1900 was exiled to Kaluga Province. He was then exiled for a three-year term to Vologda Province. In 1902 Bogdanov was joined in exile in Vologda by the twenty-six-year-old Anatoly Vasilevich Lunacharsky (1875–1933), who soon married Bogdanov’s nineteen-year-old sister. By 1902 Vologda had become the center of a remarkable Marxist literary and philosophical circle which found itself embroiled in great debates with another Marxist turning away toward idealism, Nikolai Berdyaev.

Berdyaev was a young philosopher from Kiev, a traditional source for the influx of western ideas and religious beliefs into Russia. Around 1900 he was undergoing a complex conversion from Marxism to idealism not unlike the shift to neo-Kantianism common in Western Europe at the turn of the century. Kant had divided the world into eternal noumena and transient phenomena, spirit and matter, the ideal and the real. At the core of Kant’s philosophy lay the importance of the individual acting according to moral and ethical ideals, the categorical imperative. In reaction to nineteenth-century materialism and positivism, with its cult of science, Berdyaev now moved to defend the individual against the tyranny of social progress, and religious and ethical values against scientific knowledge.

In his Subjectivism and Individualism of 1901, Berdyaev cited the “strivings of Faust” to achieve knowledge and power over nature and defended the individual’s spiritual elevation and “idealistic enthusiasm” in the search for eternal truth. The essence of the world was not matter but spirit, the ideal and not the real. The Russian intelligentsia in its fervor for a radical transformation of society had given up on religion and ethics, but it was precisely these sources of idealism that were now needed to overcome the materialism of the day. A “spiritual rebirth” of the proletariat was more important than material gains, wrote Berdyaev. He attacked Marxist materialists for their “positivist alchemy” in which they claimed to answer religious questions with a system of social science and economic thought. Ideas and ideals, not the material needs of the class struggle, move individuals to action.¹⁷

Faced with this challenge, Bogdanov and the other Vologda exiles began to develop arguments against Berdyaev’s idealism. One of Lunacharsky’s first acts upon arriving in Vologda in February 1902 was to dash off (in one hour and ten minutes) an article, “The Tragedy of Life and White Magic,” that roundly attacked Berdyaev from a Marxist standpoint. In search of an outlet for their writings, Bogdanov wrote Lenin in Geneva in March 1902 that “there is a group of people ready and able to give you literary cooperation” by writing brochures “for broad layers of the urban population.”¹⁸

Lenin’s initial response to Bogdanov’s offer did not bode well for their future relationship. Bogdanov had sent on various manuscripts written by members of his circle for publication in Iskra. Although Bogdanov agreed with Lenin initially that the “one-person principle” was crucial to effective conspiratorial organization, he objected when Lenin attempted to edit Bogdanov’s own manuscript. Unless Lenin printed his essays unaltered, Bogdanov threatened, he would send them to the Socialist Revolutionaries or another socialist group for publication. Bogdanov also complained in the spring and summer of 1902 that Lenin had not sent the essays to the address that Bogdanov had indicated. Although Bogdanov enciphered the key parts of his own letters, many Russian socialists were placed under arrest that summer in Moscow and Vologda, and communication between Vologda and Geneva became increasingly difficult because of police surveillance.¹⁹

In September 1902 Bogdanov wrote Lenin that the Vologda circle would “try to cooperate with Iskra” and asked for a set of new addresses, enciphered in the pages of Heinrich Heine’s book Bimini. Yet communication remained difficult, and throughout 1903 Bogdanov concentrated on organizing literature for a new legal Marxist journal published in Moscow and entitled Pravda (Truth). Bogdanov apparently had only a distant knowledge of the Bolshevik-Menshevik split that summer. In February 1904 he left Russia for Geneva and met Lenin for the first time. Cut off from the RSDRP and its Menshevik majority, Lenin now sought support from Bogdanov and his circle; by early 1904 Bogdanov, Lunacharsky, Skvortsov, and Bazarov had all arrived in Geneva.²⁰

In 1904 Lenin needed Bogdanov, a well-known socialist philosopher and journalist with good contacts inside Russia. “Bogdanov promised to attract money to the Bolshevik treasury,” recalled Valentinov, “to develop contacts with Gorky, to win over Lunacharsky, a lively writer and good speaker who was making his debut in literature (he married Bogdanov’s sister), Bazarov, and some young Moscow professors who were flirting with Marxism.”²¹ At the time Lenin was a man without a party; Bogdanov offered new followers, new writers, new ideas.

Politically, Bogdanov shared with Lenin a Marxist and socialist view of the world, but one characterized by independence of thought and attention to a wide variety of then popular European thinkers. Like Lenin, he disliked the Menshevik émigrés who claimed to speak for the workers of Russia, and placed greater emphasis on practical revolutionary activity inside Russia. In Geneva in 1904 Bogdanov produced a series of political pamphlets in which he attacked the Russian government and its prosecution of the Russo-Japanese War; criticized the liberals as bourgeois intellectuals who were simply “temporary allies” of the proletariat in the common campaign for a “democratic constitution”; and urged the RSDRP to free itself from liberal slogans and fight for its own party “self-consciousness.” The pamphlets appeared under the pseudonym Riadovoi, or “Rank-and-file.”²²

For Bogdanov, socialism meant the ultimate nationalization of the means of production in the hands of the proletariat. But unlike Marx and Lenin, Bogdanov laid great emphasis on technology and industrial machinery in shaping worker consciousness. In addition to allying with peasants and liberals, Bogdanov urged workers to “unite in unions, strikes, and any other means to compel capitalists to improve the workers’ wage condition and the government to legislate factory laws beneficial to the workers.” Workers must struggle constantly to organize themselves into “syndicates” or trade unions; “thus the workers will unite in larger and larger masses: hundreds, thousands, even tens of thousands” and would take over “a small number of large enterprises, rather than a lot of small ones.” In none of his writings did Bogdanov place much emphasis on a revolutionary party or even on politics; instead, he emphasized the consciousness of workers developed through the experience of the general strike. Although Bogdanov’s writings showed a certain affinity for European syndicalism, his politics reflected a much broader and more complex philosophical view of the world, an outlook based on collectivism.²³

Bogdanov’s philosophy had begun to emerge in his Short Course on Economic Science and was further developed in a series of books and articles written between 1901 and 1906. Like other Marxists of the day, Bogdanov viewed history as class struggle progressing through the phases of feudalism, capitalism, and socialism outlined by Marx and Engels. Yet instead of the labor theory of value Bogdanov placed a new emphasis on energy, technology, and state planning in shaping the economic future. Progress for Bogdanov meant the domination of nature by man, a domination facilitated by the machine. He even predicted a socialist future of “automatic mechanisms in which the worker’s role is almost exclusively supervisory and controlling over the machine’s actions.”²⁴ The energy multiplied by machines would create a new planned society of harmony, freedom, and progress that would replace the inequities of capitalism. Following the works of Edward Bellamy and H.G. Wells, Bogdanov developed the utopian strands of Marxism into his own philosophy of a socialist future.

Underpinning Bogdanov’s notion of socialism was a broader concept of collectivism that emerged first in the critique of Berdyaev’s ethical individualism. To Berdyaev’s idealism, Bogdanov counterposed the ideas of Marxist realism. Bourgeois society, wrote Bogdanov, had created a kind of individual authoritarianism that justified class oppression. The individual personality had become a fetish of bourgeois society and thought, propped up by the false dichotomy between the ideal and the real. A society of two hostile classes created dualist categories of thinking. Socialism would create a philosophy of “monism” in which the entire world consisted of energy and its transformations, and where individualism and egoism, represented in the thought of Berdyaev and Kant, would disappear. For Bogdanov all ideas and ideologies were merely forms whereby we organize our experience. Science itself is based on collective experience, the shared data of scientists. Socialism would be not merely a political system, but a new philosophy, whose center was not the bourgeois individual but the socialist collective.

Collectivism would come into being when the consciousness of the masses had moved away from thinking about their own “I” to the common “we.” Authority would give way to cooperation and worker solidarity, individualism to collectivism, the “merging of individual lives into one grandiose whole.” The authoritarian division between the ideal bourgeoisie and the real proletariat would disappear. The revolution would be an “explosion of ecstasy that seizes society.”²⁵

In Pravda in 1904 Bogdanov wrote of the need for a “collectivizing of man” (sobiranie cheloveka). The idea of “Man,” he wrote, is a “whole world of experience.” “A group lives as a whole; there is no individual personality (lichnost’), no idea of ‘I’, as a special center of interests and goals.” The “I” or self is the product of a world of specialization, division of labor, and authoritarian dualism. The true man is not an individual but a collective “comrade” (tovarishch). “Man has not yet arrived,” concluded Bogdanov, “but he is nearby, and his silhouette shows clearly on the horizon.”²⁶

For Bogdanov collectivism was a religion, and even promised a triumph over death. The individual was “nothing more than the chaos of experience.” Individual immortality was a Christian and bourgeois delusion. But collectivism would provide a kind of surrogate “victory over death” in which the individual would live on through the memory of the collective. It would also be an ideology, an organizing form of experience that would shape the socialist world view of the masses.²⁷

Bogdanov’s syndicalism, positivist faith in science, and collectivism were also shared to one degree or another by other Marxist writers in Vologda and Moscow. In 1904 they had responded to Berdyaev’s collection of essays Problems of Idealism with their own Essays on the Realistic World View. In contrast to the dualism of the ideal and the real, they substituted the monism of Marxism. S. Suvorov, following Ernst Mach’s Analysis of Sensations, argued that the world is mere chaos until our mind organizes our experience into useful knowledge and myth. Lunacharsky called for a new positivist “science of values” in aesthetics that would transcend the class-bound religions and art of bourgeois society. Socialism through art should express its “Promethean aspirations” and aspire to a “victory over spontaneity” in which humanity would produce Nietzschean “supermen.” Socialism for Lunacharsky would bring about nothing less than a new “religion of humanity.”²⁸

In another essay Bazarov criticized the Kantian moral absolutes defended in Problems of Idealism. Citing Mach and Richard Avenarius, Bazarov argued that the “autonomous personality” of the individual in bourgeois society did not really exist except as a “completely empty, meaningless formula.” Idealism was the product of an “authoritarian metaphysics” in a master-slave society dominated by the bourgeoisie. Bogdanov added an essay in which he revised the Marxist labor theory of value and argued that the law of supply and demand in the marketplace, not simply the labor expended in the production of goods, determined economic values. V. Shuliatikov wrote a critique of bourgeois individualism in contemporary Russian literature, and V. A. Friche characterized the art and literature of capitalism as a form of neurosis.²⁹

The collectivist critique of individualism persisted in 1903 and 1904 in the pages of various Russian literary journals. Lunacharsky called for a new religion of science, claiming that “the fear of death does not exist for an active positivist.” For Lunacharsky, the importance of Mach’s thought was not its sensationalist critique of metaphysics, but its portrait of the self or “I” as “something which continues to exist in other persons even after my death.” Socialist immortality would consist of eternal life in the memory of the collective.³⁰

Writing in Pravda, Bazarov also continued to contrast the individualist hedonism and egoism of bourgeois society with the moral altruism of socialism. Even in modern science, he noted, “autocratic” laws of nature were giving way to more “democratic” concepts of the universe. For Lunacharsky the realism of Marxism surpassed the false idealism of bourgeois thought, still dressed, he argued, “in Kant’s old frock coat.”³¹

The arrival of Bogdanov and members of the Pravda circle in Geneva in 1904 presented Lenin with a dilemma. On the one hand, Lenin desperately needed supporters in his war on the Mensheviks, especially writers of the quality of Bogdanov and Lunacharsky. On the other hand, Bogdanov’s revisionism threatened to give the Mensheviks an opportunity to attack the Bolsheviks for their philosophical heresies. Neither Lenin nor Bonch-Bruevich wished to be criticized as bad Marxists. Nonetheless, the Lenin-Bonch publishing operations, fortified by Kuklin’s money, continued to print not only Marxist writings but Populist and syndicalist ones as well. In addition, they published considerably more copies of pamphlets by Bogdanov and Lunacharsky than by Lenin.³² The two new Bolshevik writers brought a well-honed literary style and a sharp-edged independence of mind not well suited to Lenin’s authoritarianism. For Lenin, Bogdanov and Lunacharsky represented both a political asset and a philosophical danger.

In February and March 1904 Lenin was hard at work in Geneva writing One Step Forward, Two Steps Back, his vitriolic attack on the Mensheviks and their behavior during and after the second party congress of 1903. Volsky found Lenin going through a “startling change” in which he became increasingly emaciated, dull-eyed, and depressed. He even gave up his habitual games of chess.³³ It was a moment of choice: conciliation with the Mensheviks, or a new departure with a new group of followers. The Menshevik Paul Axelrod charged that Lenin was in the process of forming a “Jacobin club,” an “organizational utopia of a theocratic character.” In One Step Forward, Lenin accepted the label “Jacobin” and announced his further progress toward a hierarchical and dictatorial model of the revolutionary party.

In May 1904 Volsky persuaded Lenin to examine the writings of Ernst Mach and Richard Avenarius, writings that appeared to provide philosophical underpinnings for much of Bogdanov’s thought. After three days of poring through Avenarius’s Critique of Pure Experience, borrowed from the Social Revolutionary émigré Viktor Chernov, Lenin was furious. Denouncing the ideas of Mach and Avenarius as “worthless, confused, and idealistic theory,” Lenin filled eleven small lined notebooks with a handwritten attack on their philosophies. Volsky described Lenin’s attitude as “savage intolerance.” Lenin concluded only that “a man who builds his philosophy on sensation alone is beyond hope. He should be put away in a lunatic asylum.”³⁴

Volsky thought that Mach and Avenarius could provide a “better epistemological foundation” for Marxism than materialism. George Plekhanov, the doyen of Russian Marxist theory, disagreed. “Avenarius? Mach?” Plekhanov asked Volsky; “Are you dragging these fellows out of the basement of bourgeois thought in order to ‘correct’ Marxism with their help?” For Plekhanov, who had not yet read either Mach or Avenarius, it was enough to see the hydra of revisionism. Lenin agreed, noting that “social democracy is not a seminar where different ideas are compared. It is the fighting class organization of the revolutionary proletariat.”³⁵

At issue was nothing less than the entire philosophical basis of Marxist materialism. Volsky sympathized with the ideas of Mach and Avenarius because, he said, they “utterly demolish all metaphysics in a most revolutionary way.” Lenin, on the other hand, agreed with Plekhanov that Marxism was a kind of absolute and orthodox truth that should not be revised, at least by others. “There is only one answer to revisionism,” Lenin told Volsky. “Smash its face in.”³⁶

What were the ideas of Ernst Mach, and how did they come to enter Bolshevism through the writings of Alexander Bogdanov in 1904?

Ernst Mach and the Politics of Empiriocriticism

I see Mach’s greatness in his incorruptible scepticism and independence.

—ALBERT EINSTEIN

Nonsense, long-winded claptrap.

—V. I. LENIN

What Lenin called “Machism” was a major trend in European philosophy of science in 1904. Ernst Mach (1838–1916) was a well-known Austrian physicist and philosopher whose copious writings argued that all metaphysics should be eliminated from science, that time and space were not absolute entities but categories of the human mind, and that the world is only the sum of our sensations of it. For Mach there was no dualism of mind and matter, but only a monism of sensations. Since sensations and experience vary from one individual to another, Mach articulated a relativistic view of the universe that for a time exerted a powerful influence on the young Albert Einstein. As a radical critique of materialism and atomism, Mach’s thought was also anathema to Lenin. Mach represented a transitional philosophy at the turn of the century, a nineteenth-century system builder whose very system contained a relativism and scepticism toward all belief systems that anticipated the new century as well.³⁷

Mach’s significance lay in his positivist relativism, grounding all science in experiment and hypothesis, in anticipation of the later Vienna Circle; his reduction of science to the symbolism of hypothesis, convention, and form; and his political stance of liberal socialism, which made him attractive to such Austrian socialists as the young Friedrich Adler (1879–1960). Adler fused the ideas of Mach and Marx into a new theory of socialism that proved attractive to Bogdanov and threatening to Lenin.

Mach expressed his ideas in a variety of books that were continuously reprinted in Europe and Russia between 1905 and 1915: The Conservation of Energy (1872); The Science of Mechanics (1883); The Contribution to the Analysis of Sensations (1886); and Knowledge and Error (1905). In them Mach developed a theory of the physical universe that was considerably different from the great Newtonian synthesis of mechanics that had dominated physics since the end of the seventeenth century.

Mach lived in an age when the picture of a universe made up of tiny hard objects known as atoms was being demolished by new discoveries. In 1895 Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen discovered the mysterious x-ray whose photographs appeared to demonstrate the penetrability of matter. By discovering the electron in 1897, J. J. Thompson showed that atoms were not hard and irreducible, but composed of still smaller particles. The initial discoveries of radioactivity by Marie Curie and Ernest Rutherford between 1896 and 1905 showed further that certain forms of matter could emit energy as radiation and in the process be transmuted into new forms and elements. Albert Einstein’s three famous physics papers of 1905 also argued that matter was merely a convertible and transformable form of energy, which appeared to be the primal substance of the universe.

But if matter was merely a form of energy, was energy a substance or a hypothesis? For the German physicist Wilhelm Ostwald, a follower of Mach, energy was indeed the primal substance in a monist universe. Energy was the potential to do work, and all matter was a form ofenergy. Atoms were only the hypotheses of the scientists. Everything that occurs in the universe is a transformation of energy, which is eternal and immortal, since it can neither be created nor destroyed. For Ostwald all matter was either “form-energy” or “volume-energy,” and “the continued use of the word ‘matter’ has become unsuited to scientific language.” Ostwald’s energetics, in short, undermined materialism as an unscientific world view in an age of major scientific discovery.³⁸

In addition, Ostwald suggested that energetics provided a kind of immortality for the collective, if not the individual. Matter decays and dies; energy is immortal. “Energy will outlive everything else in the universe,” proclaimed Ostwald. Individual atoms die; the collective of mankind in all its generations lives on through “self-sacrifice for the sake of humanity.” In this sense Ostwald’s critique of atomism was also a collectivist critique of individualism.³⁹

Mach, too, characterized himself as a monist who rejected the Cartesian dualism of spirit and matter, as well as the dualism inherent in Bishop Berkeley’s notion that esse est percipi, to be is to be perceived. Berkeley had argued that the world exists only as perceptions in our mind. Mach argued that “the world is our sensations” and rejected any dualist division between self and other, ego and world, in favor of the new monism. Most attractive for some Russian Marxists and collectivists was Mach’s argument that “the ego must be given up” in favor of the collective. What Lenin attacked was Mach’s relativism and sensationalism; what Bogdanov borrowed from Mach was his collectivism.

In Geneva in 1904 Mach’s ideas were all the rage, as they were in Zurich and other Swiss centers of learning. Young physics students absorbed Mach’s criticism of Newtonian space-time absolutes as a “conceptual monstrosity” and welcomed his portrait of science as hypothesis, rather than absolute truth. Objects now became complexes of sensations, and matter a form of experience. Albert Einstein discovered Mach’s ideas while a student at Zurich in 1897; by 1904 Mach had a profound effect on Einstein’s thought, both by emphasizing the need for science to agree on useful conventions, such as space and time, and by identifying reality with sensations. Yet Einstein never did share Mach’s critique of atomism, and later moved away from Mach to the view that science consisted of laws, not hypotheses; that the velocity of light was absolute, not relative; and that reality consists of more than our.⁴⁰

The fullest explanation of Mach’s views was his Analysis of Sensations, originally published in 1886. In it he argued that material bodies were nothing more than complexes of our sensations situated in space and time. More important for Marxists and socialists, Mach leveled a philosophical broadside at the very notion of an individual: “The ego is as little absolutely permanent as are bodies. That which we so much dread in death, the annihilation of our permanency, actually occurs in life in abundant measure.” The self, as a complex of sensations, does not die but simply changes form. The individual and the idea of individual immortality are useful fictions. In general, wrote Mach, “no point of view has absolute, permanent validity. Each has importance only for some given end.”⁴¹

Mach also reiterated the difference between his own monism and Berkeley’s dualism of spirit and matter. Under the influence of Buddhism, Mach argued the need to “get rid of the conception of the Ego as a reality which underlies everything.” The self, like all matter, was merely a “mental symbol standing for a relatively stable complex of sensational elements.” Loss of self in the collective was the answer to individualism, which was merely another useful hypothesis.⁴²

Mach therefore stood for a radical critique of materialism, of absolute truth, and of individualism. At least some Marxists felt that his views might well modernize and supplement, rather than threaten, the ideas of Marx and Engels, and among them was Friedrich Adler.

In Zurich in 1904 Friedrich Adler was another rebellious physicist and mathematician in the mold of his great friend, Albert Einstein. Thin, pale, and blond, he was the son of the Austrian socialist leader Victor Adler, and a brilliant and rising physicist in his own right; when Einstein accepted the post of Associate Professor of Theoretical Physics at Zurich University in 1909, it was only because Adler had first turned down the position himself as an act of generosity to his friend. Fanatical, sensitive, and widely read, Friedrich Adler was steeped in the writings of Marx and Mach, Kautsky and Einstein. He bridged the two worlds of physics and politics, and attempted to reconcile them in his own writings.

For Adler, Mach had provided an entire new philosophy of science in which theories were not truths, but tools, useful hypotheses to be tested and refined. Mach read the young Adler’s physics papers and offered support and praise. Like other Marxists of the day, Adler felt that Marx’s theories were somewhat outmoded. Capitalism had generated as much material progress and social reform as class struggle, and nationalism was as much a force in prewar Europe as socialism. As soon as he began reading Mach and Ostwald in the summer of 1903, Adler realized that Marxist materialism could no longer measure up to the standards of modern physics and its discoveries. To be a scientist and a Marxist was not easy, and Adler hoped to find in Mach a philosophy of reconciliation.⁴³

Politically, Mach was a liberal socialist. As a representative to the Austrian parliament, Mach worked for the nine-hour day and electoral reform. He criticized both church and state for their excesses of authority, the “robbery of the many by the few,” and hoped for a more equitable socialist and anticolonialist future. Most important was the streak of collectivism that Mach found in Buddhism, an elimination of the ego and the self that argued against the notion of personal immortality. For Mach the existence of the individual was a useful fiction, and individual death a dissolution of the body into nothingness and Nirvana.

Mach’s collectivism had a powerful influence on Adler through its relativism, its scepticism toward all dogma, and its critique of mechanical materialism. As a physicist and a socialist, Adler carried Mach’s message to many other socialists before 1914. Among them was Alexander Bogdanov. In the end Adler’s relativist critique of all authority took a violent and anarchist turn when, in 1916, he assassinated the Austrian prime minister, Count Sturgh. In this instance Lenin was quite correct to see in Mach’s thought a threat to his own brand of Marxist orthodoxy, as well as a rival philosophy of political extremism.

Mach was a popular thinker in Geneva in 1904. The sixth edition of his History of Mechanics had just appeared, and he offered an up-to-date, scientific philosophy that fit well the needs of young socialists to be both radical and scientific. His relativism and collectivism found a welcome response among many socialists, especially in his radical critique of individualism. “The ego,” wrote Mach, “must be given up. It is partly the perception of this fact, partly the fear of it, that has given rise to the many extravagances of pessimism and optimism, and to numerous religious, ascetic, and philosophical absolutes.”⁴⁴ And it was Mach’s monism, collectivism, and relativism that soon divided Lenin and the other Bolsheviks on matters of both philosophy and politics.

The empiriocriticism of Mach and the fusion of Mach and Marx by Friedrich Adler provided considerable reinforcement for Bogdanov’s emerging collectivism, but they were neither its first nor its only elements. Bogdanov had already worked out the view that political organization meant the organization of worker experience, just as the human mind organizes experience to undestand the world. Under capitalism, the atomized experience of individuals predominated; under socialism, experience would be organized collectively in a philosophy of altruism, self-sacrifice, and proletarian culture. But how?

Already in 1904 it was clear that Bogdanov sought to organize workers’ experience through ideology and myth, not a political party. Like Lenin, he recognized the need to impose consciousness upon the workers from outside through an intellectual elite. But for Bogdanov, ideas, more than power, ruled the world and would galvanize the proletariat to action. Lenin saw himself, with Plekhanov’s assistance, as a correct interpreter of Marxist orthodoxy. Bogdanov saw himself as a philosopher reinterpreting Marx in the light of changing historical and social conditions, the creator of a universal organizational science of society. Bogdanov and the Pravda circle in Moscow now joined Lenin in Geneva to establish a new political movement: Bolshevism.

The Origins of Leninism

By the summer of 1904 Bolshevism had developed little beyond what it had been a year earlier after the second RSDRP congress, a fractious group of emigré Russian Marxists with a poorly coordinated network of agents and correspondents inside Russia. It was not a “disciplined order of professional committeemen, grouped round a band of conspirators who were all linked by personal allegiance to their chieftain, Lenin,” as one historian described it.⁴⁵ In fact, even before the term “Bolshevism” came into use, the fraction was divided between Lenin’s tiny circle in Geneva and an RSDRP committee dominated by Marxist intellectuals in Moscow.

Lenin had lost control of the Iskra editorial board and resigned in disgust. In Geneva the dominant RSDRP leaders were all sympathetic to Martov and the Mensheviks, social democrats with whom Lenin shared an attitude of mutually suspicious peaceful coexistence. Russia was caught up in the throes of an ill-fated war with Japan, and Lenin was unable to acquire any funds from the Iskra board, to win over local RSDRP committees inside Russia, or to convene a new party congress. He had been expelled from the party central committee and condemned in print for his independent publishing operation with Bonch-Bruevich and Kuklin. In August 1904 Lenin was a man without a party.

One can hardly argue that in 1904 “while his competitors had merely adherents, Lenin had followers.”⁴⁶ Lenin’s Geneva circle consisted of M. N. Liadov (Mandelshtam), who directed the smuggling operations for Iskra into Russia, Krupskaya, Bonch-Bruevich and his wife, and the Lepeshinskys. P. N. Lepeshinsky, characterized as an “Oblomov” by Lenin, ran a Russian restaurant in Geneva together with his wife, Olga, who later achieved a certain notoriety in the 1940s as Stalin’s favorite cell biologist. N. V. Volsky (Valentinov) and his wife also worked in the restaurant. Volsky was already suffering private doubts about both Marx’s philosophy and Lenin’s personality.

The new arrivals from Russia were hardly obsequious followers of Lenin. Bogdanov and Lunacharsky were established Marxist writers of some reputation. They were joined in Geneva by P. G. Dauge from the Moscow RSDRP committee, who spent three days with Lenin bringing him up to date on the Moscow party organization.⁴⁷ Bogdanov arrived in Geneva in May 1904, after meeting Trotsky, whom Bogdanov disliked immediately.⁴⁸ In Geneva Bogdanov met Lenin for the first time.

When the RSDRP central committee endorsed Menshevik control of the Iskra editorial board, it deprived Lenin of the right to represent the central committee abroad and prohibited publication of his writings without permission of the central committee. Iskra also refused to publish articles by Bogdanov, although the Mensheviks did not know the true identity behind Bogdanov’s pseudonym Riadovoi.⁴⁹ While Plekhanov and the Mensheviks attended the Amsterdam meeting of the Second International in August, Lenin and Krupskaya spent several weeks with the Bogdanovs and two other Bolshevik couples in a tiny Swiss village discussing the necessities of organizing a new political party.⁵⁰

Bogdanov proposed coopting Lunacharsky, Skvortsov, and Bazarov for literary work on a new publication to counter the Menshevik-controlled lskra. Yet Lenin wanted nothing to do with Bogdanov and his Machist philosophy, however much he needed his reputation and his pen. After two days of furious discussion and debate, Bogdanov and Lenin declared a truce in matters of philosophy and an alliance in matters of politics. Politically, Bogdanov deferred temporarily to Lenin as the “greatest man in our party.” Philosophically, he continued to hold to his collectivist views. The result was the “Declaration of the Twenty-Two,” a Bolshevik manifesto read aloud by Lenin at the Lepeshinsky restaurant. In it he attacked the Mensheviks and proclaimed the need for a new organ and a new party.⁵¹

Lenin and Bogdanov continued to bring out pamphlets critical of the Mensheviks, thanks to Bonch’s money and contacts with a French publisher. The Bolsheviks divided themselves into an “editing board” (Lenin, Vorovsky, Olminsky, and Lunacharsky) in Geneva and a “practical center” for operating illegally inside Russia (Bogdanov, Gusev, Zemliachka, Liadov, Litvinov). The first group began working on the creation of an émigré newspaper in Geneva; the second group left for Russia, where it constituted itself as the “Bureau of Committees of the Majority” (BKB). The final meeting of the entire Bolshevik group, complete with German beer and a holiday atmosphere, took place at the Cafe Landolt in Geneva.⁵²

As Lenin admitted, the problem now was an acute shortage of funds. On the eve of Bloody Sunday, the Bolsheviks remained a tiny émigré circle of Russian Marxists united by a common penury. The term “Bolsheviks” was not yet in use, but only the terms “majority” (bolshinstvo) or “group of the majority” (gruppa bolshinstva). In October 1904 Krupskaya wrote Bogdanov, now living in Tver, requesting more action and better communication. Lenin also asked Bogdanov to establish a code name or alias for the writer Maxim Gorky. “In general,” wrote Lenin, “the money situation is very desperate, since a lot is needed to send people to Russia (a great demand) and for transport.” At the very moment when there was a “complete schism” in the party, complained Lenin, “Russia is organizing and expects decisive steps from us.”⁵³

On November 21, 1904, Lenin wrote Bogdanov again that “the majority needs to get out its own organ; for this we need money and correspondents. We must work hard to obtain both.” Lenin also complained about lack of information about events inside Russia. “Not one letter, not one communication about the writers’ group in Moscow,” he wrote. “What about Bazarov, Fritsche, and the others?” Bogdanov’s “great plans,” muttered Lenin, had turned into a “great fiction.”⁵⁴

In fact, Bogdanov was not inactive. In December 1904 he assembled in Moscow a group of new members of the majority’s bureau. This assemblage made it clear that Bolshevism was now a geographically divided movement consisting of a committee network inside Russia headed by Bogdanov and an émigré circle in Geneva headed by Lenin. This division between Russia and “the other shore” was compounded by the organizational difference between Bogdanov’s collectivist myth and Lenin’s Jacobin authority. But at the moment each man needed the other; Lenin was especially dependent on Bogdanov’s network inside Russia for funding an émigré newspaper in Geneva. This need was soon fulfilled by a most unlikely source of Bolshevik support, the Moscow Old Believer community.

By late 1904 it was evident that Leninism and Bolshevism were not identical. Leninism referred to the plans for party organization of a newspaper laid down in What Is to Be Done? But, as was pointed out, in the book “there is no plan of organization, although at the time there was a lot of talk about a ‘Leninist’ plan. That meant only the creation of a party organ.”⁵⁵ Inside Russia, however, the young Stalin found Lenin to be a real “mountain eagle” for his stress on consciousness over spontaneity. “This is the significance of Leninist thought,” wrote Stalin in October 1904. “I call it Leninist because no one in Russian literature has expressed it so clearly as Lenin.”⁵⁶

The term “Leninism” appeared earlier than the term “Bolshevism.” The words “Leninist” and “Martovist” emerged in 1904, but the terms “Bolshevik” and “Menshevik” did not become widespread until the end of the year, and the distinction between old and new supporters of Iskra was more common. Even in 1905, Bolshevik publications came out under the name of Vpered, the Geneva newspaper, or of the “V. Bonch-Bruevich and N. Lenin Publishing House for Social Democratic Party Literature.” Lenin himself did not use the term “Bolshevism” until late 1907.⁵⁷

Bolshevism had little organizational or political identity until the revolution of 1905. By the time the term “Bolshevism” came into use, it encompassed both Lenin’s exile circle in Geneva and Bogdanov’s network inside Russia, and represented an uneasy alliance between Leninists and collectivists in both philosophy and politics. Lenin’s Marxist orthodoxy and Bogdanov’s Machist collectivism were mutually necessary, and ultimately competitive, doctrines of political organization, often couched in the language of science. Together they formed Bolshevism.